I have never quite
believed in the furor being generated by Unidentified Flying Objects. There
have been feature articles lately in almost all of the daily newspapers.
There has been a great deal of reporting of UFO sightings in flying magazines
and trade papers.

Most of these stories
combine sightings by reliable persons with weird tales of bearded monsters
emerging from Louisiana bogs or something like that. Instead of delving
carefully into one report, they make up a mish-mash of incredible stories,
and readers discount them, as I have.

Last week, however,
I heard a chilling report of a sighting as told by a listener who phoned
a local station in St. Louis.

The caller was an
airline captain. He had a slight southern accent and was apparently very
sincere. He would not identify himself or his airline, and I can understand
his reasoning.

At 38,000 feet last
May he spotted a large object with a tube-like shape floating off his right
wing. Doubting that any equipment we know could be pressureized and certificated
to occupy that section of airspace, he deviated slightly from his air lane
to take a closer look.

His co-pilot and
flight engineer both observed it. It was dusk and he advised the passengers
to look out the right window and take pictures if they had cameras.

His flight engineer
took a Polaroid out of his flight bag and got three shots, slightly blurred,
but obviously showing something red, hovering, with a projection or hump
underneath it.

When they landed
at the destination airport, the captain took the names of passengers who
admitted seeing the object and collected a fourth roll of undeveloped film
from one of them with a promise to return it. He then went to his dispatcher,
wrote a report by hand of the circumstances and attached the film and the
pictures to it.

He has never heard
from his company.The dispatcher advised he turned everything over to the
airline office that evening. The dispatcher was transferred to another
city, and repeated calls to the airline are all answered with the denial
that anyone has EVER received the report with pictures.

The captain was told
that he could file another report and was advised that the airline had
more than 150 UFO sighting reports on file and that he should "cool
it."

He called the radio
program because they were discussing the subject. He sounded darned authentic
to me. All this would make one believe there is some kind of conspiracy
either to keep these "sightings" from the public or report them
in such a strange manner that they sound implausible.